Cavanaugh Cold Case (9 page)

“Yes, sir, we did,” Malloy replied in as calm a voice as Kristin had ever heard him use. She glanced in his direction as he asked Abby's father, “May we come in?”

The older man all but stumbled as he backed up. Kristin couldn't tell if it was because the professor was trying to give them some room to enter, or if he'd stumbled like that from the impact of the words he'd just heard.

Belatedly, Sullivan answered, “Sure. Come in. Come in. I'm right, aren't I?” he asked nervously, looking over his shoulder at the two people even as he led them to his living room.

Every flat surface within the partially darkened room had a framed photograph of a bright-eyed, smiling young girl with long blond hair. It was a panorama that began with a photograph taken straight out of the hospital the day she was born and abruptly stopped with a photograph of her standing before a building that was clearly on a campus. Abby appeared to be about nineteen.

“It's about Abby, isn't it?” Sullivan asked again, his voice sounding raspy as the question clawed up his throat.

“We're very sorry, sir,” Kristin said, taking the man's hand between hers as she made eye contact with the professor.

His eyes filled with tears—as did hers. “Then she is dead,” he said sadly, murmuring the words almost to himself. And then he looked at Malloy for his answers. “How did it happen? How did my little girl die?”

“We're not sure yet, Mr. Sullivan,” Malloy told him. “Her body was found buried at the perimeter of a cacti and succulent nursery in Aurora. It was called Prickly Gardens. Would you have any idea why she might have been there? Did your daughter work there or know anyone who worked there?”

“A cacti nursery?” Sullivan asked, clearly mystified. He shook his head. “She hated those things. What was she doing there?” he asked.

“That's what we're trying to find out,” Malloy told him gently, not bothering to point out that he had asked the man the same question. He tried something easier. “When was the last time you saw your daughter?” The man made no response. He clearly looked shell-shocked. “Mr. Sullivan?”

Kristin took the man's hand again, closing hers over it and doing her best to get him to come around. “Mr. Sullivan, this could be very important and help us get whoever did this to your daughter. Please think. When was the last time you saw her?”

He didn't have to pause to think. It was obviously a date that had been stamped on his heart. “August eighteenth of '95. She was driving this old Corolla back to college.” He pressed his lips together to keep them from quivering. It took him a moment to pull himself together. “She was a headstrong girl, and we'd had an argument just before she left.” He let out a shaky breath. “Margaret thought she just ran off because I'd yelled at her.”

“Margaret?” Kristin questioned as unobtrusively as possible.

“My wife,” he explained. “She blamed me when we didn't hear from Abby.” For a second, he sounded like a man reliving his worst nightmare. “When she didn't come home anymore,” he all but whispered. And then there was confusion mixed with high anxiety as he looked at them. “You said someone buried her? Do you know how long ago they did that?”

“We don't have anything even close to exact yet,” Malloy told him, “but since you told me when you last saw her, going by what we do know, I'd say it was approximately shortly after she left home that August.”

Sullivan scrubbed his hands over his stubbled face. “Oh, God, all this time I've been hoping, praying that she was all right and that she'd come around eventually. And all this time, she was in the ground—lost to us.” His voice hitched.

“If you're up to it, Mr. Sullivan, we'd like to ask you a few more questions,” Malloy prompted as gently as he could.

“Anything,” Henry Sullivan said. “Ask me anything. I don't have anything to live for except catching the bastard who did this to my little girl.” He grabbed hold of Malloy's arm. “You will catch him, right?”

“We'll catch him,” Malloy promised.

Chapter 8

“W
hy did you tell that man you were going to catch whoever killed his daughter?” Kristin demanded in a hushed whisper when they walked out of Henry Sullivan's house nearly an hour later. “You can't make a promise like that in good conscience.”

“I damn well am going to try to catch whoever killed his daughter,” Malloy told her, and then his mood lightened just a little as, approaching his vehicle, he asked her, “Why are you whispering? Sullivan's inside the house. He can't hear you from there.”

Kristin realized that she'd overreacted. She shrugged, feeling somewhat foolish. “For a minute, I thought he might come out and follow us.”

She hadn't really thought that, but it was a good enough excuse to give the detective.

Opening the door on the passenger side, Kristin got in. “That poor man's been through so much. He clearly holds himself responsible in some way for his daughter's death.”

“Lots of girls have arguments with their fathers and they don't go running away—or wind up dead.” Malloy got in on his side. “Besides, he said she was going back to college after summer break. It's very possible that whatever happened to her might have happened either on the way back, or after she got to school.”

“Her father said he never spoke to her again,” she reminded Malloy.

He put his key into the ignition and started up the car. “Typical teenage stuff. She held a grudge, didn't want to talk to him until she cooled off—or Sullivan apologized. Either way, that doesn't point to her running away.”

“What makes you such an expert on teenage girls?” she challenged.

“Three sisters—and I have the scars to prove it,” he added with a grin.

Kristin deliberately looked out through the windshield, avoiding eye contact for the moment. He had a way about him that was getting to her, and she really didn't want that happening.

“Maybe you should look up some of the teachers she had at the time. One of them might be able to give you some insight into what her on-campus life was like.”

He glanced at her with amused admiration. “You know, if you set your mind to it, you might make a pretty good detective, Doc.”

“What makes you think I'm not one already?” she said, forgetting her promise to herself, and glared at Malloy. “You put together crime-scene clues. I put together the clues that a dead body gives me.”

Instead of offering an argument, Malloy nodded. “You have a point.”

Kristin frowned. That wasn't the response she'd expected from him.

“Stop being so agreeable,” she told him. “It makes it hard for me not to like you.”

“Good, because that's one of my goals,” he told her amicably. “To get you to like me.”

She wasn't about to ask him about his other goals, and she definitely wasn't going to let him get to her, Kristin thought. She wasn't about to become just another name in a long list of women in his past. “Don't get any ideas, Detective.”

“It's Malloy, remember? And it's too late,” he told her. “Those ideas have already gotten ‘got.' By the way,” Malloy said, switching subjects before she had time to get worked up, “you were right.”

“About?”

He took a turn down a side street. “I think you being there for Professor Sullivan when I broke the news about his daughter actually helped him process it.”

He spared Kristin a glance as he was forced to stop at a red light. “I have to admit I'm surprised. I wouldn't have pegged you for a hand-holder. Especially since you're a medical examiner.”

“It's not always a patient's bedside where bedside manner comes into play. I've had to be there for my share of identifications,” she told him.

He'd seen her with Sullivan, and it certainly seemed as if she felt the man's pain. But if that was the case, something didn't make any sense to him.

“If you have all this bottled-up compassion, why
is
it that you choose to cut up dead bodies instead of ministering to live ones?”

She thought they'd already gone through this. Obviously not to Malloy's satisfaction. His question reminded her of her mother's oh-so-frequently voiced lament. “Now you're beginning to sound like my mother again.”

“Then I guess it's a lucky thing for you that we're back,” he announced, pulling up into the precinct's rear parking lot.

Kristin got out of the car while the engine was still running. To her surprise, it continued running. When she looked back into the car, she saw that Malloy hadn't unbuckled his seat belt.

“Aren't you coming?”

“I thought I'd take your advice and take a ride to UCA,” he told her, referring to the local university. Abby Sullivan had attended the Aurora branch of the University of California. “Maybe I can find a few answers that might lead us to her killer—and if we're really lucky, to the killer of all those other young women. I'll check in with you later to see if you've managed to identify any of the other victims,” he said, putting the car into reverse.

“Something to live for,” Kristin cracked, stepping away from the car.

The window on his side of the vehicle was rolled down. Malloy craned his neck in order for her to hear him through the open window on the passenger side.

“It could be,” he told her, underscoring his sentence with that same smile that was beginning to twist into the recesses of her mind like a swiftly boring corkscrew, unsettling it.

In order to negate the effect, she waved a hand at the detective without even bothering to turn around as she headed to the stairs and away from the parking lot.

And away from Malloy.

She could have sworn she heard him laugh as he drove away, but maybe that was just the sound of the wind. At least she could hope it was.

* * *

Malloy had always had an easy time of getting whatever he needed by managing to effortlessly utilize his charm. Thus, what might have taken another, more abrupt detective several hours, if not days, to get his hands on, took Malloy next to no time at all.

After just a minimum of well-selected words on his part had been exchanged with Elizabeth Reid, the dour-looking administrative assistant who had put in more than thirty years in the registrar's office, she was only too happy to track down Abby Sullivan's classes and the names of the professors who had taught them. The fact that the schedule was twenty years old didn't seem to be daunting to her.

“I'm afraid more than half those educators have either retired or moved on,” the woman told him after she had returned from the archives. Elizabeth Reid had disappeared for a full half hour and had emerged with the former student's schedules for the two semesters that she had attended the university.

She held up the fruits of her labor. Two photocopied sheets, one for each semester she had attended the university. “I've taken the liberty of checking off the ones who are still teaching here.”

Taking the schedules from her, Malloy smiled appreciatively at the older woman. “You are a real lifesaver, Ms. Reid.”

The woman seemed almost lighthearted as she responded, “Elizabeth, please.” And then her smile wavered for a moment as she obviously thought about the reason behind the request. “Anything to help find that poor girl's killer. I know that these kinds of things happen all the time, but you'd like to think that it will never touch
your
life,” she said with all sincerity.

“Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury to think that way,” Malloy told her, taking the two sheets of paper she'd put together.

“No, of course not.” Elizabeth was quick to agree. “It must be very hard for you to deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis,” she speculated. “How do you stand it?”

Malloy had never dwelt on that part of it. If anything, he always thought himself past the ordeal.

“It comes under the heading of ‘protect and serve,'” he answered. He glanced at the two pages that the administrative assistant had handed him. “If I could bother you with just one more question—”

Elizabeth stifled what sounded suspiciously like a giggle. “You're not bothering me at all, Detective,” she assured him with an encouraging smile.

His eyes indicated the names on the schedules. “Could you tell me where I could find the teachers that you've checked off?”

“Of course, of course,” she instantly agreed. The next moment she was writing in the information beside each of the marked names. Handing the pages back to him, the woman said, “If you need anything else, please, don't hesitate to ask.”

“I won't,” he told her with feeling. When he took her hand, it was as much to caress it as it was to shake it. “And thank you.”

“My pleasure, Detective Cavanaugh,” the woman said, addressing his back with a heartfelt sigh. “My pleasure entirely.”

* * *

The name Abby Sullivan rang no bells for the teachers he subsequently questioned. None of the five instructors he spoke with could remember anything outstanding about the young woman. They were all equally dismayed when they were told why he was questioning them about a run-of-the-mill undergraduate who had left no impression to mark her passage.

In an attempt to jolt their memories, Malloy showed each of them a photograph he had gotten from the victim's father.

Only one of the teachers, Roman Ward, a professor of English lit, recalled her at all.

“Yes, I think I do remember her,” Ward said, after studying the photograph on Malloy's smartphone. “She had a nice smile. The kind that was both shy and managed to pull you in at the same time.” He handed the smartphone back to Malloy. “You say she was killed?” he asked in subdued disbelief.

“Yes.” Malloy tucked away his phone. “Sometime in the fall of '95,” he added, studying the professor's expression for any telltale reaction that might give something away.

There was none.

But Malloy noted down the man's name just in case. Not everything was black and white.

So far, the professor was the only one who even recognized Abby Sullivan.

* * *

“Could mean absolutely nothing,” Malloy allowed. “And then again, he could have said he remembered her to hide the fact that he had reacted when I showed him Abby's photograph,” he told Kristin when he got back from the college campus.

It was after five, and the morgue seemed eerier somehow the closer it was to nighttime.

“So in other words, you're telling me you have nothing to tell me,” Kristin concluded, putting down the small digital recorder she had been talking into just before Malloy's unannounced arrival at the morgue.

She was becoming oddly accustomed to having him just pop up, and this disturbed Kristin to no end.

“More or less, yes,” Malloy agreed. He was about to add a playful coda that he just couldn't make himself stay away, but decided to table that for the time being. With someone like Kristin, unless he was mistaken, less was more.

“Well, lucky for you,” she told him with some self-satisfied pride—an emotion she wasn't accustomed to having, “I've had a more productive afternoon.”

“Regale me,” he told her, happy that at least one of them was getting somewhere with this.

“I wouldn't dream of it,” she countered, not quite sure where Malloy wanted to go with his invitation. “But I did verify my hypothesis.”

“Which is?” he asked, trying to remember. Since nothing occurred to him immediately, he requested, “Refresh my memory.”

For once, Kristin obliged without prefacing it with a cryptic comment. “I told you that all those bodies we found were killed when they were between the ages of around eighteen to thirty.”

“And now you're sure?” he guessed. It wasn't exactly much of a stretch, given her lead-in.

“As I can be forensically,” she replied.

“And that verification came in the form of—”

“Their teeth,” she told him. It was obvious that she was very pleased with this turn of events.

She might have been pleased, but Malloy had no problem making it known to her that he didn't understand the process.

“But wouldn't you have to have someone's dental records to attempt a match?” he asked.

“Yes, I would,” she agreed. “
If
it was for a specific ID. However, figuring out a person's age at the time of death in general depends on the development of the enamel on the person's teeth. Technically it's called a C-14 analysis and when conducted on people who were born in the last fifty years—”

Malloy held up his hands in blatant surrender. “You don't have to go into the particulars, Doc. I believe you.”

He paused to look around at the various exam tables, not to mention any available flat surfaces, that were covered with the disjointed but fairly neatly arranged skeletal remains that had been dug up.

“So on the surface,” he theorized, “it looks like we're dealing with a serial killer who had a thing for females between the ages of eighteen—and Abby Sullivan was nineteen—and thirty, during a killing spree that ended, what? Twenty years ago, right?”

Kristin nodded.

There was still that one sticking point that nagged at him. “That doesn't explain the presence of the lone male skeleton that was dug up.”

She reminded him of what she'd said the other day. “Like I said, he could have been a transvestite and our serial killer did away with him in a rage when he found out he'd been duped. His limbs weren't hacked, so this killing doesn't appear to have been thought out like the rest of the murders. It was spur of the moment,” she added. “Or,” she went on, thinking out loud, “the male victim could have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Malloy saw what she was getting at. “You mean he could have witnessed the killer in action, doing away with one of the girls, and got killed himself so that he wouldn't tell anyone.”